Privacy and Google

Google is making so many inroads into our daily lives that it must be pretty easy for them to know a lot of stuff about each individual.

Using the search engine itself leaves a trace. If Google wishes, then for a given fixed IP address, it can gain a whole lot of personal information on the person/people who use that IP address to search stuff on the web.

Recently we had the AOL blunder which showed how much of data on an individual these service providers can collect over time. And the fact that we can't assume that this data will be safely guarded by the company.

Now there is this new idea of google, of offering shopping coupons (discounts) to customers who used local google maps to search for a store/business establishment. Given the fact that the person using such a service will have to give the home address to get the route to the store, Google will get one more critical piece of information on the user. Combining this information with the IP address and all the search engine logs, will almost open up the life story of a net savvy individual.

blogger.com is also a google product. Anonymous blogs are really not anonymous. What are the odds that a person writing an anonymous blog at blogger.com will not use google as the search engine? What if this anonymous author then decides to use google maps to get directions?

As google gets more and more involved into our daily 'on-the-internet-lives' our privacy is at stake.

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Tag: Technical

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